Canada: Roxana Ng
The term 'activist-scholar' was likely coined to describe a person like Roxana Ng, an Inter Pares Board member since 1999. Her academic work is testimony to a lively and creative mind, and a curiosity that encompasses an extensive range of interests. All of these interests - holistic health and healing, globalization and labour relations, immigrant women and Canadian institutions, anti-racism, feminism and transformative education - are firmly grounded in her own experiences as a woman, as a 'visible minority,' and as a community activist.
Roxana is Associate Professor in the Adult Education and Counselling Psychology Program at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Sharing her research and ideas within the activist feminist movement is as important to her as her work in academia. Roxana's book, The Politics of Community Services: Immigrant Women, Class and State (1988, reprinted 1996), has been widely used in university classes and by community organizations.
After emigrating from Hong Kong to Canada in 1970, Roxana co-founded the Vancouver Women's Research Centre, and since then she has helped establish immigrant women's organizations in several provinces of the country. Roxana is also involved in Open the Borders, an association concerned with increasingly restrictive and punitive changes to immigrant and refugee policies in Canada. Open the Borders organized an international conference on migration and displacement in Vancouver in March 2002, where Roxana made a presentation on "Mapping Migration and Globalization: Canada's Garment Industry and its Workers." She based the presentation on her action-research with the Homeworkers' Association on how globalization and work-restructuring transforms immigrant garment workers' experiences. Roxana shared with participants her analysis that, "With globalization, immigrant women are undergoing a process of re-colonization in Canada and they - together with garment workers around the world - are increasingly exploited and impoverished." She called on academics and social change activists to work together to propose and promote national and international policies that are based on the values of diversity, equality, and social and economic justice.
For more information on Roxana Ng's research and publications, go to 
www.oise.utoronto.ca.
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